Obama's Interrogation Policy & the Use of Torture in the Army Field Manual

Originally posted at Firedoglake

For quite some time, I have strongly suggested that the progressive community take up the centrality of abusive interrogations, as enumerated in the Army Field Manual, most particularly, in the latter's "Appendix M." The failure to do so, I've argued, would have serious repercussions for civil liberties, not to mention the struggle for accountability over past use of torture. In my last two articles, we've looked at the contemporaneous use of abusive Appendix M interrogations at Guantanamo, and the issue as to whether these kinds of coercive interrogations will now be brought, with the planned transfer of prisoners from Guantanamo, to the U.S., itself.

As torture proper moves from offshore U.S. military and CIA/Special Operations prisons to the territory of the U.S. "homeland," civil liberties activists and commentators must make their protest against the use of torture techniques in the Army Field Manual heard in the White House. The truth about the use of cruel, inhumane, and degrading interrogation techniques must drown out the obfuscatory fear-mongering from the Cheneyesque right-wing, who babble about how the AFM is inadequate for use by intelligence agencies in the "Terrorist War."

I believe some progress has been made in the past year on this issue, and was heartened to see Stephen Rickard's article at Huffington Post late last August. Rickard is Director at the Washington Office of the Open Society Institute. He noted that the new AFM never explicitly banned the use of the "enhanced interrogation" techniques of the old Bush administration.

It strains credulity to think this was an accident. Language in the old [1992 Army Field] Manual clearly banned wall standing and other stress positions. It was deleted [in the 2006 Manual]. The old Manual called sleep deprivation "torture." That was deleted. Rather than banning the use of cold, the 2006 Manual only prohibits causing "hypothermia" consistent with OLC limits on using cold. The 2006 Manual prohibits "beatings ... or other forms of physical pain." But it doesn't flatly ban assaults, which is critical because the OLC memos argue at great length that the authorized physical assaults -- slapping, grabbing, walling and others -- were intended to cause shock and not "pain." The 2006 Manual does not ban using water or cramped confinement.

It strains my credulity to think that the use of torture techniques in the current Army Field Manual has not become a bigger issue than it has. But there has been a plethora of issues and leftover crises from the Bush years, such that it's not surprising that some important causes have not yet broken through into public consciousness.

Last August, the Obama administration unveiled its new studied policy on interrogations, proclaiming that "the Army Field Manual provides appropriate guidance on interrogation for military interrogators and that no additional or different guidance was necessary for other agencies."

But the Washington Post story by Anne Kornblut that reported on the new policy continued the legacy media’s practice of lying about what's in the AFM

Will Military Torture Be Transferred to the United States?

Originally posted at Firedoglake

My last article [on this topic] reintroduced the topic of abuse and torture as being used in the current version of the Army Field Manual (AFM), and particular in its infamous "Appendix M." From time to time, the implications of actually using the AFM has theatened to break through the right-wing monopoly of discussion about government interrogation policy. Consider this exchange, last May, between NBC's Chuck Todd and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs:

Q What is he going to say to those who make the argument, which has been made, he's actually just changing rhetoric, he's not changing policy that much? With Guantanamo, you're essentially calling for a way of moving Guantanamo. You're just changing the name.

MR. GIBBS: Well, ask that question of some of our severe detractors on this and see if you get agreement on that. I actually don't think that's the case. I think what the -- the decision that the President made on military commissions is something that's envisioned that's much different than what was passed in Congress and signed by the President in late September and early October in 2006.

I think, as we've talked about here, enhanced interrogation techniques are something that this President has outlawed as part of the actions of this administration. I don't think those are --

Q Yet the fine print, there's open to interpretation about what different techniques could be used.

MR. GIBBS: How so?

Q In the argument that there's definitely some words in there that one could interpret that it's --

MR. GIBBS: Chuck, I don't think you're -- let me understand -- I don't think you're intimating that the Army Field Manual would allow one to do --

Q There have been some interpretations that there are --

MR. GIBBS: I can assure you that's not how the Army interprets the Army Field Manual, and I assume that generals in the Army and the military that are in charge of ensuring that the procedures of the military are in line with the laws of this country -- I don't think you're intimating that people in the Army are inferring different things about their own field manual, because I know that's not the case.

Gibbs appears to think that the military can be trusted to ensure "the procedures of the military are in line with the laws of this country," eviscerating the idea of Congressional oversight. What Todd calls "fine print" in the Army Field Manual -- "open to interpretation" -- others have called torture or abuse.

The President of the National Lawyers Guild Marjorie Cohn has stated that portions of the AFM protocol, especially the use of isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, constitutes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and is illegal under the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, has stated that portions of the AFM are "deeply problematic" and "would likely violate the War Crimes Act and Geneva," and at the very least "leave the door open for legal liability." Physicians for Human Rights and the Constitution Project have publicly called for the removal of problematic and abusive techniques from the AFM.

The Center for Constitutional Rights wrote last year:

Appendix M of the Army Field Manual... allows the use of techniques such as prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and inducing fear and humiliation of prisoners. These techniques, especially when used in combination as permitted by the AFM, constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and in some cases, torture. These techniques have caused documented, long-lasting psychological and physical harm and were condemned by a bipartisan congressional report released last month, as well as by the Bush-appointed head of the military commissions at Guantanamo.

"In some cases, torture." As bmaz pointed out almost exactly one year ago, when Guantanamo Convening Authority judge Susan Crawford dismissed charges against Guantanamo prisoner Mohamed al-Qahtani, telling Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward that the U.S. tortured al-Qahtani:

Crawford has exposed to bright sunlight the lie that is Barack Obama’s, and other politicians’, simple minded reliance on the Army Field Manual as cover for their torture reform credentials. Interrogators can stay completely within the Army manual and still be engaging in clear, unequivocal torture under national and international norms, laws and conventions.

Now -- all delays due to 23-year-old would-be bombers aside -- Obama is set to transfer the Guantanamo regime to a nearly abandoned, rural Illinois prison. Will that include the transfer of Appendix M interrogations, and other abusive elements of the AFM protocol? These are questions we need to be asking. Or will progressive bloggers hope that Chuck Todd carries their fire for them?

Next: "Obama's Interrogation Policy and the Use of Torture in the Army Field Manual"

George Carlin on Airport Security & "Terrorists"

H/T to kgosztola, who placed the YouTube routine in the middle of his excellent diary at FDL's The Seminal, He Tried to Blow Up the Plane with a Condom Bomb & Why Getting Hysterical About Airport Security is Wrong.

Sheer hysteria or the illusion of hysteria dominates the conversation in the media right now.

The public is being subject to fear that those in power hope will trickle-down and influence Americans as they continue to grapple with the thought that a bomber carried explosives in his underwear on to an airplane....

Pick out the stories that you think have and have not happened since the underwear bomber failed to bring down America with his condom bomb of mass destruction:

-Joan Rivers deemed a danger to national security, a man detained on a plane for unruly behavior or spending too much time in the bathroom

-A German family’s vacation canceled after the father in the family joked about having explosives in his underwear

-An airport in Newark shut down after a man wandered the wrong way through a checkpoint

-A man late for his flight opts to take all of his clothes off and go through security nude to hopefully ensure that he won’t be subject to a gratuitous search that will lead him to miss his flight or be stalled by a Nigerian or Muslim in line in front of him

-And, a California airport experiences a scare as five Gatorade bottles carrying honey are discovered and the bag the contents are being carried in test positive for TNT and two TSA agents open one of the bottles and become nauseated from the fumes and are both treated and released from a local hospital.

See also Tom Tomorrow's Underpants of Mass Destruction. (H/T ratfood) 

Additional wars are casually discussed!

Torture Confirmed at Guantanamo; Army Field Manual Codified Abuse

Originally posted at Firedoglake

Recently, it occurred to me that, with all the debate or controversy over the Obama administration's policies on torture, no one had asked the military, and in particular those running America's "terror" prisons, if they had been using the Army Field Manual's Appendix M. So, I called Guantanamo's Public Affairs Officer, Lt. Commander Brook DeWalt, and asked him if Appendix M interrogations had taken place at Guantanamo.

This question may have more than intrinsic interest, as the administration has now announced that it is pursuing moving over a hundred Guantanamo "detainees" to a prison in Illinois. (The actions of Umar Abdulmutallab on an American Airliners jet on Christmas Day may have thrown a monkey-wrench into the "closing" of Guantanamo, but, most likely, Obama's plans will move forward.)

Lt. Commander DeWalt took a few days to get confirmation, but when he spoke to me on December 11, he confirmed that while "not routine," Appendix M interrogations are conducted at Guantanamo "as authorized," "in accordance with DOD directives and U.S. law." He would not go into operational specifics. Officer-In-Charge of the 4th Public Affairs Detachment (Guantanamo Forward), Lt. Col. James Crabtree, whom was also contacted, declined to be more forthcoming about dates when asked for more specific dates of operational usage.

Appendix M is the portion of the 2006 revised Army Field Manual that covers "unlawful enemy combatants" who don't meet the U.S. government's criteria for Geneva treatment as prisoners of war. Obama doesn't want to call them illegal combatants anymore, so the government doesn't call them anything, except people with lesser rights.

Famously, President Obama has proclaimed, as did his predecessor, that he was against torture, and was banning it in his administration. As a result, the Obama administration closed down the CIA secret black site prisons, though not, as it turns out, all secret black site prisons.

Obama also rescinded the torture memos of Bybee/Yoo/Bradbury/Addington/Levin, and replaced them with an interrogation policy oriented around the Bush-era Army Field Manual (AFM), whose latest incarnation was the brainchild of Donald Rumsfeld's assistant, Stephen Cambone. At first, the new AFM was supposed to have a secret annex, so the "worst of the worst" could be grilled in U.S. military prisons, and not have any bleeding hearts or Al Qaeda types getting wind of what was going on.

But, brilliantly, one has to admit, they hit on the idea of simply laying the document openly among the people, and when there was no protest, and the politicians dutifully saluted, the new torture policy was ready to go.

Obama Freezes Transfers of Yemeni Prisoners from Guantanamo

Even the news agencies recognize that Barack Obama's decision to suspend the transfer of prisoners already cleared for release from Guantanamo indefinite detention to their home country of Yemen is due to political pressures.

The pressures are stemming from the Christmas Day would-be bombing of a jet by a 23-year-old Al Qaeda recruit, who lit himself on fire in his attempt to set off the explosives he was carrying. Since then, war chatter from Washington has centered around fears regarding the disintegration of the Yemeni state, and in particular by the supposed several hundred Al Qaeda members residing there.

There are major separatist movements in both the north and south of the country. Saudi and U.S. jets have attacked the Houthi Shi'ite rebels in the north in the past month. While the U.S. press is fixated on the smaller Al Qaeda "insurgency", the rebellion in the north is far bigger. As of last November, 10,000 Houthis were living in makeshift UN refugee camps, with thousands more said to be pouring in every week.

From the Economist:

Whether or not there is a link to Iran, the rebellious Houthis have long been a thorn in the side of governments in Sana’a. But they —- and Yemen’s Zaydis in general -— have not usually been keen to spread or impose their version of Islam. They insist that they simply want a better deal from the central government for their impoverished northern region. Abdul Malik al-Houthi and Yahya al-Houthi, two brothers of the late [Houthi leader] Hussein, argue that they are merely defending their beleaguered community from the government’s aggression and discrimination.

President Saleh denies that he wants to do down the Houthis. He is himself a Zaydi, whose adherents may account for more than a quarter of the country’s 25m people, most of whom follow the Shafi school of Sunni Islam, one of its main four.

In any event, the Saudi intervention has helped Yemen’s own hard-pressed forces. But the Houthis, whose armed rebels are said to number anything from 2,000 to 10,000, are far from defeated. They dig tunnels into the mountains, lay roadside ambushes and hit Yemeni and Saudi patrols with “improvised explosive devices” (IEDs) similar to those that insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan use against Western forces and their local allies.

The Center for Constitutional Rights has released a statement regarding the decision of the Obama administration to suspend the transfers of the Guantanamo Yemeni prisoners:

Dozens of men from Yemen who have been cleared for release after extensive scrutiny by the government’s Guantànamo Review Task Force are about to be left in limbo once more due to politics, not facts. Many are about to begin their ninth year in indefinite detention.

Halting the repatriation of Yemeni men cleared by the Task Force after months of careful review is unconscionable. It will also effectively prevent any meaningful progress towards closing Guantánamo, which President Obama has repeatedly argued will make our nation safer.

As we approach the eighth anniversary of Guantánamo and the president’s failed deadline for its closure, it is important to remember that the vast majority of the men at Guantánamo should never have been detained in the first place, and that over 550 have been released and are peacefully rebuilding their lives. Most of the nearly 800 men who were brought to Guantánamo were not captured by the American military on any battlefield, but seized in broad sweeps during the chaos of the Afghan war or in other locations around the world and sold to the U.S. in exchange for substantial bounties. We know from the military’s own records that most of the detainees at Guantánamo have no link to terrorism.

When he accepted his Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama said, ‘We lose ourselves when we compromise the very ideals that we fight to defend. And we honor those ideals by upholding them not when it's easy, but when it is hard.’ What he said in December should be just a true a month later.

For more information on who these prisoners are, check out this excellent article by Andy Worthington, which tells the story of some of these prisoners.

Remember "Tiger Force" Special Operations Atrocities

With the recent controversies as to whether U.S. forces were involved in the brutal murder of eight young students in Afghanistan, it might provide some perspective to look back at the history of other crimes perpetrated in earlier wars by U.S. soldiers, as many might find the news of a possible massacre by U.S. military forces to be unthinkable.

Back in late 2003, the Toldeo Blade ran a series of articles on a U.S. special operations task force called Tiger Force, which belonged to the United States Army, 1st Battalion (Airborne) , 327th Infantry Regiment, 1st Brigade (Separate), 101st Airborne Division.

The Blade's investigation began after the newspaper obtained 22 pages of classified Army records detailing atrocities by Tiger Force.

The records of the Army's Criminal Investigation Command were just the start.

Reporters reviewed volumes of research on the Vietnam War, finding no mention of the Army's investigation of the platoon's atrocities.

They inspected thousands of declassified records of the case from the National Archives in suburban Washington and obtained hundreds of additional classified documents of the case. They also interviewed dozens of former Tiger Force soldiers.

The following is a selection from one of the Blade articles, "DAY 1: Rogue GIs unleashed wave of terror in Central Highlands," by Michael D. Sallah and Mitch Weiss. The entire series is very much worth reading.

For seven months, Tiger Force soldiers moved across the Central Highlands, killing scores of unarmed civilians - in some cases torturing and mutilating them - in a spate of violence never revealed to the American public.

They dropped grenades into underground bunkers where women and children were hiding - creating mass graves - and shot unarmed civilians, in some cases as they begged for their lives.

They frequently tortured and shot prisoners, severing ears and scalps for souvenirs.

A review of thousands of classified Army documents, National Archives records, and radio logs reveals a fighting unit that carried out the longest series of atrocities in the Vietnam War - and commanders who looked the other way.

For 41/2 years, the Army investigated the platoon, finding numerous eyewitnesses and substantiating war crimes. But in the end, no one was prosecuted, the case buried in the archives for three decades.

No one knows how many unarmed men, women, and children were killed by platoon members 36 years ago.

At least 81 were fatally shot or stabbed, records show, but many others were killed in what were clear violations of U.S. military law and the 1949 Geneva Conventions.

For those who cannot believe that U.S. forces could ever participate in crimes as terrible as the handcuffing and killing of school-age children (never mind that the U.S. has killed hundreds of civilians in Afghanistan, many by pilotless drones and Hellfire missles), consider the tales of Tiger Force, and reflect on the terrible thing that is war without accountability.

Andy Worthington's Updated Complete List of Guantanamo Prisoners

Andy Worthington has posted his latest and most definitive installment of his list of Guantanamo prisoners:

Now updated (as my ongoing project nears its four-year mark), the four parts of the list are available here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four....

When I first published the list in March, I promised — perhaps rather rashly — that I would update the list as more prisoners were released, a task that proved easier to promise than to accomplish. As a result, this update to the four parts of the list draws on the 290 or so articles that I have published in the last ten months, tracking the Obama administration’s stumbling progress towards closing the prison, reporting the stories of the 41 prisoners released since March, and covering other aspects of the Guantánamo story; in particular, the prisoners’ habeas corpus petitions in the US courts, in which, since March, nine prisoners have had their habeas corpus petitions granted by the US courts, and six have had their petitions refused (the total, to date, is 32 victories for the prisoners, and just nine for the government). Overall, as it stood at December 31, 2009, 574 prisoners had been released from Guantánamo (42 under Obama), one — Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani — had been transferred to the US mainland to face a federal court trial, six had died, and 198 remained, including one man, Ali Hamza al-Bahlul, who is serving a life sentence after a one-sided trial by Military Commission in 2008....

To this I would only add that, nearly a year after President Obama took office, I hope that the list and its references provide a useful antidote to the current scaremongering regarding the failed Christmas plane bomber, Omar Farouk Abdulmutallab, and his alleged ties with one — just one — of the 574 prisoners released from Guantánamo, in a Yemen-based al-Qaeda cell. This purported connection is being used by those who want the evil stain of Guantánamo to endure forever (still led by former Vice President Dick Cheney, but also including a number of spineless Democrats) to argue that no more of the Yemenis — who make up nearly half of the remaining prisoners — should be released, even though the ex-prisoner in question is a Saudi, even though no more than a dozen or so of the 574 prisoners released have gone on to have any involvement whatsoever with terrorism, and even though all of these men were released during the presidency of George W. Bush....

As the eighth anniversary of the prison’s opening approaches, it remains imperative that those who oppose the existence of indefinite detention without charge or trial — and who call, instead, for the full reinstatement of the Geneva Conventions for prisoners of war, and federal court trials for terrorists — maintain the pressure to close Guantánamo, and to charge or release the prisoners held there, as swiftly as possible.

We all owe a debt of gratitude to Andy Worthington for doing the work no one else in the media would do. In his blog posting, he notes the fact that the New York Times, with no real contextual examination, has also posted a list of documents pertaining to each prisoner online.

Khost Suicide Bomber: Links Between CIA and Jordanian Intelligence Working in Afghanistan

MSNBC has a new story up on the Khost suicide bomber, who killed up to eight CIA officers or contractors last week. They identify him as a Jordanian-Al Qaeda double agent, “Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal al-Balawi, 36, an al-Qaida sympathizer from the town of Zarqa, which is also the hometown of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Jordanian militant Islamist responsible for several devastating attacks in Iraq.”

Al Balawi was supposedly turned by the Jordanians, who have a small but important force in Afghanistan. Al Balawi was supposed to be a key figure in the hunt for Zawahiri, and apparently had come to the CIA base with “urgent” info on the #2 Al Qaeda leader, but came instead with a bomb around his chest. His Jordanian handler, Sharif Ali bin Zeid, said to be related to the Jordanian king, was also killed.

The Jordanians are reported to be quite in bed with U.S. intelligence. We knew that things like this were true from revelations about extraordinary rendition. What's new is the role these torturers are playing in U.S. operations outside their own countries:

Bin Zeid’s prominent role offers rare insight into the close partnership between American and Jordanian intelligence officials and how crucial their relationship has become to the overall counterterrorism strategy.

“We have a close partnership with the Jordanians on counterterrorism matters,” a U.S. official told The Washington Post. “Having suffered serious losses from terrorist attacks on their own soil, they are keenly aware of the significant threat posed by extremists.”

Well, well, well... so the U.S. likes to play with the torturers. We knew this from all the rendition business, but didn’t know they were sending advisers into U.S. operations. You’ll notice I call the Jordanian General Intelligence Department (GID), or Mukhabarat, torturers. There’s a lot of precedence for that, as NGOs have been making and documenting such charges for years. I also have first hand experience working with people who were tortured and even “turned” by the Jordanians. They love to do the latter, and this time, it blew up in their faces, literally.

Here’s the Christian Science Monitor on Jordan’s torture record recently:

Early in 2008, Human Rights Watch (HRW) published the results of interviews with more than a dozen former detainees who said they were tortured in GID custody. On Wednesday, the group issued a new report, alleging widespread torture in Jordan’s regular prisons – particularly among Islamists convicted of national security crimes.

The allegations are based on unsupervised interviews with 110 prisoners in seven prisons around the country in 2007 and 2008. More than half of those interviewed said they had experienced some form of torture or ill-treatment, and 30 showed physical evidence of abuse. There were accounts that 5 out of 7 prison directors were involved.

“To root out torture you need to be able to name and shame, and prosecute where appropriate, those people who perpetrate that crime,” says Christoph Wilcke, HRW’s researcher for Jordan and Saudi Arabia.

If anything, the U.S. alliances in Afghanistan will make the corrupt and questionable alliances forged in Iraq look like a Sunday school Quaker meeting by comparison. First it was mass murder killers like General Abdul Rashid Dostum, now it’s torturing Mideast intelligence agencies. Gee, aren’t we glad to have a smiling Nobel Peace Prize icon like Obama standing up to represent American ideals in Afghanistan?

Atrocity: U.S. Massacre of Afghan Children in Ghazi Khan

Blogger David Swanson has done yeoman's work in directing attention to news reports of the U.S. counterinsurgency executions of ten people in the dead of night last week -- eight of them schoolchildren as young as ten years old. Swanson's website, AfterDowningStreet.org, has some excellent commentary on the story, including links to most of the major articles in the mainstream press.

According to the London Times, "Locals said that some victims were handcuffed before being killed." David Lindorff at AfterDowningStreet comments on how the atrocity of the killings was buried in the New York Times article on the story:

Let’s be clear here. If the charges are correct, that American forces, or American-led forces, are handcuffing their victims and then executing them, then they are committing egregious war crimes. If they are killing children, they are committing equally egregious war crimes. If they are handcuffing and executing children, the atrocity is beyond horrific. This incident, if true, would actually be worse than the infamous war crime that occurred in My Lai during the Vietnam War. In that case, we had ordinary soldiers in the field, acting under the orders of several low-ranking officers in the heat of an operation, shooting and killing women, children and babies. But in this case we appear to have seasoned special forces troops actually directing the taking captives, cuffing them, herding them into a room, and spraying them with bullets, execution style.

Given the history of the commanding general in Afghanistan, General Stanley McChrystal, who is known to have run a massive death squad operation in Iraq before being named to his current post by President Obama, and who is known to have called for the same kind of tactics in Afghanistan, it should not be surprising that the US would now be committing atrocities in Afghanistan. If this is how this war is going to be conducted, though, the US media should be making a major effort to uncover and expose the crime.

There have been protests by hundreds of university students in Jalalabad over a rise in civilian deaths in the Afghanistan war, and particularly over the shootings of the schoolchildren.

"The government must prevent such unilateral operations otherwise we will take guns instead of pens and fight against them (foreign forces)," students from the University of Nangahar's education faculty said in a statement.

Marching through the main street of Jalalabad, the students chanted "death to Obama" and "death to foreign forces", witnesses said.

Meanwhile, Lindorff directs us to a New Years Day story in the London Times, which reports that Afghanistan President Hamid Kharzai's security chiefs are demanding that the killers be turned over to the Afghan government, noting that the chief UN representative in Afghanistan, Kai Eide, has corroborated the story of the murder of the students.

The call heightens a war of words between the Afghan Government and its powerful military backers. It is the first time that Mr Karzai has tried to hold foreign forces directly accountable for killing civilians, although he has issued impassioned responses to civilian casualties that threaten to undermine Nato’s mission in Afghanistan.

It also reflects the growing assertiveness of a Government that precariously held its position after fraudriddled elections in August and open criticism from Nato countries over corruption.

The Times article continues, quoting NATO sources (bold emphasis added):

Conventional US units told investigators that they had no knowledge of the operation, in Narang district in eastern Kunar province. Assadullah Wafa, who led the investigation, said that US troops flew to Kunar from Kabul late on Saturday. Nato sources said that the foreigners involved were non-military, suggesting that they were part of a secret paramilitary unit based in the capital.

Mr Wafa said that they landed helicopters outside the village and walked in at the dead of night before shooting the children at close range. “They were children, they were civilians, they were innocent,” he said. “I condemn this attack"....

Nato’s International Security Assistance Force said there was “no direct evidence to substantiate” the Government’s claims that unarmed civilians were harmed in the “joint coalition and Afghan security force” operation.

Spencer Ackerman, who early on was reporting on the murky initial reports surrounding the massacre, has posted General Stanley McChystal's call for a joint U.S.-Afghan investigation into the killings. The Pentagon statement is notable for its starchy sang-froid, given that eight students under 18 were brutally murdered in the middle of the night, most of them from the same family. The joint U.S.-Afghan unit that supposedly did the killings was supposedly investigating an IED bomb-making factory.

An initial review by a Government of Afghanistan delegation asserted that the dead were unarmed civilians removed by international forces from their homes and shot. While there is no direct evidence to substantiate these claims, ISAF has requested and welcomes an immediate joint investigation to reach an impartial and accurate determination of the events that occurred.

ISAF is a committed partner with the government and people of Afghanistan, and as such we embrace the responsibility to conduct our operations with the strictest degree of constraint to avoid civilian casualties. If we fail to meet this highest standard to which we subject ourselves, we will always look within to improve our capacity to avert unintended consequences in the future.

"... we will always look within"? What the hell is that supposed to mean? It reads like a not-so-veiled threat to others to back off. Well, it's the U.S. government, and U.S. society as a whole, that should be looking within, deeply within. The news of a bloody, gangland-style execution of children by U.S. or U.S.-backed special operations unit, in a war led by a Special Operations general, should have members of Congress screaming hell, with hair on fire, to get that general back before a Congressional committee under oath, and find out what the hell is going on, and prosecute those responsible, up to and including those who ordered the mission.

Of course, the U.S. should not be in Afghanistan at all. The story that it is seeking out Osama bin Laden, or that it is fighting to end terrorism, has grown quite old over the last eight years. Instead, it is the U.S. government that has taken on the role of terrorist. The "war on terror" has exemplified Nietzsche's dire adage, that if one spends too long staring into the abyss, the abyss stares back into you.

Also posted at The Seminal/FDL